Alignment tendencies

[Alzrius]

I recently posted a new house rule to my Pathfinder blog, Intelligence Check, regarding alignment tendencies (as a legacy rule from previous editions of D&D).

Basically, this states that, if part of your alignment is Neutral, you can have a "tendency" towards an alignment one step away from the Neutral component, e.g. Lawful Neutral (with Evil tendencies). This has a mechanical effect too, basically letting you keep your normal alignment most of the time, except for a few things where you can use your tendency if it's more beneficial.

The blog post explains it in more detail, but this is my way of trying to deal with players who elect to play a Neutral alignment, rather than Good, because they're worried about spells and effects that damage good-aligned characters but not neutrally-aligned ones.

As a note, this is the second instance of Pathfinder house rules on my blog. The first was harem rules for the city construction mechanics in the Kingmaker Adventure Path.

[Eyolf The Wild Commoner]

For a while now I've been referring to myself as Neutral Good with Chaotic Tendencies.

This such system would help me implement that for my games.

Great job man, I'll read it over.

[azhrei_fje]

Alzrius wrote:

The blog post explains it in more detail, but this is my way of trying to deal with players who elect to play a Neutral alignment, rather than Good, because they're worried about spells and effects that damage good-aligned characters but not neutrally-aligned ones.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

This metagaming has always annoyed me. I'm almost ready to rule that spells and effects work differently: instead of doing X damage against neutrals and 2X damage against good (or evil), I'd set it up to do 1.5X damage against all non-evil (or non-good) creatures. Ditto for the law/chaos axis as well.

Of course, aligned weapons are a little weird using this approach. Does a holy sword then damage all non-good the same way, so evil and neutral take the extra 2d6 damage? That seems ... "wrong". If this approach is kept, it makes aligned weapons much more valuable as they can be used against a wider variety of creatures (such as elementals).